Tree Mushrooms

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Treehouser
Joined
Feb 9, 2008
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760
Location
Steamboat Springs, CO
Found some choice "Bears Head" and "Tree Oyster" shrooms in the past couple of weeks! YummY!8) Photos are of my buddy Louis and me. The Bear's Head is also called Lobster of the woods because of its texture and taste when cooked in butter. The tree oyster's were fantastic too! When cooked with chicken they were hard to distinguish from the chicken!

Second to last photo is of a bees hive that I found when chipping a wood pile. The bees were non aggressive. Didn't get stung once when tearing open their nest when I moved a log. Left the pile alone for a week and they were gone when we came back to finish up. Anyone know what these insects might be? CIMG1517.jpg CIMG1516.jpg CIMG1518.jpg CIMG1520.jpg CIMG1510.jpg CIMG1515.jpg CIMG1489.jpg
 
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That's the Bears Head mushroom. Growing under a rotten cotton wood log that I rolled over to get chipped. The piece that the tree oysters are growing off of (first pic) was about 40 feet up, I free cut it then we left it for a week to come back and clean up when the carpenters were gone at the house we were working at. Came back and blamo! Mushrooms galore. All the shrooms I've found so far have been in cottonwoods! Whoda thunk it??!!??
 
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canadiantreeman said:
Nice. Cool that you gave it a culinary try out...

Be careful though.
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Definitely try to be, have numerous books and always try to get a second opinion before eating. Most of the ones we find get thrown out due to not being able to definitely narrow it down. These two were pretty unmistakeable.
 
Free food can't be beat. In Vermont I ate a ton of mushrooms from my finds all I have found down here are the funny ones in fields.
 
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rskybiz said:
Free food can't be beat. In Vermont I ate a ton of mushrooms from my finds all I have found down here are the funny ones in fields.
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With ya on that one!! My uncle has cows in Tallahassee. I used to live in Gainesville before I moved out here, and I'm originally from Orange Park.
 
I am currently reading "Mycelium Running". I had no idea about the connection that all living creatures have with mushrooms. Seems we are all connected by a single strand of mycelium. There are thousands of species and miles of network in a single square inch of soil. Trees would not exist in their present state without the absorbing and digestive powers of fungi. I have had my eyes opened to the world of mycelium and now everything in the tree world looks small and insignificant.
 
You 2 in Florida know where Shady Grove and Eridu are? North of Perry. That is where my bud had a place. I wanted to go mushroom hunting when I was down there. He wanted no part of it. Wuss. He tried to convince me feed additives had eradicated them. I didn't buy it. He died in '05. His wife still owns the place, but I dunno if I will go back again.
 
Since this is an international ( somewhat!) forum, it would be really helpful if people would add the latin names of species.

That first one looks a lot like pleurotus ostreatus to me, but it could just as well be something completely different, since shrooms vary a lot around the world.

Which is why I don't pick wild mushrooms once I'm out of Scandinavia.

A bunch of Vietnameese refugees living here went mushroom gathering and found one they knew from back home.
A nice white mushroom with an appetizing look and a nice taste. Plentyful, too, so they filled their baskets and brought some home for their friends and neightbours from the old country.

That pretty much wiped out the whole bunch of them.

That nice innocent looking white schroom was in fact Amanita virosa one of the deadliest scandinavian mushrooms if not in the world.
 
I was once told any fungus growing in wood is edible or atleast not poisonous. Probably not much truth in that eh?
 
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Cobleskill said:
You 2 in Florida know where Shady Grove and Eridu are? North of Perry. That is where my bud had a place. I wanted to go mushroom hunting when I was down there. He wanted no part of it. Wuss. He tried to convince me feed additives had eradicated them. I didn't buy it. He died in '05. His wife still owns the place, but I dunno if I will go back again.
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Haven't heard of those places, but I think you're right about the additives being bull! My uncle thought the same for a long time, since he didn't see any shrooms for the first couple of years of having cows. He feeds them some stuff called Super 12, which he thought knocked the shrooms out. But they're definitely around. Season seems to be when it starts staying above 80 degrees Fahrenheit at night and best to hunt about 24 hours after rain.

Stig, the one that looks like coral is Bear's Head, or Hericium americanum, H. coralloides, H. erinaceus Here's a link to a site with more info on this mushroom.

The tree oyster = Pleurotus ostreatus Here's a link
 
Stig, do you have an edible boletus variety over there? They are a very tasty and large growing here. Known locally as the king bolete. Boletus edulis.
 
My inlaws go mushroom hunting most years. My pops in law's big catch a couple years ago was king boletes, cauliflower mushroom, chantarelles (fairly common here apparently) and some morels. He was happy as a pig with a truffle.
 
simplypete said:
Stig, do you have an edible boletus variety over there? They are a very tasty and large growing here. Known locally as the king bolete. Boletus edulis.
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Absolutely, they are amongst the 5 best shrooms IMO.

As a matter of fact all sweet tasting boletes are edible in Scandinavia , as are all sweet tasting milk-caps lactarius and all sweet tasting members of the Russula family.
That makes it fairly easy to be a shroom gatherer in Denmark, except that we have some extremely poisonous look- a- likes lurking around, trying to kill the less skilled amongst us.

But Death is the mother of beauty, right?
 
Now, if you had read the original poem by Wallace stevens instead of something by a 17 year old girl it might have:)

I didn't mention the poem or writer bacause Ed ( Thor's hammer) and I have a thing going about guessing each other's obscure poetic references, so I was waiting for him to come up with it)

It is akin to "no light without darkness"

It is the possibillity of losing stuff ( like life!) that makes us appreciate it.

In this case, it is the act of pitting your knowledge of mushrooms against those lurking poisonous ones that adds flavour to the whole thing.
Otherwise, you'd as well just buy agaricus in the supermarket.

Let me toss in another of my favourite quotes here to illustrate:

" Remember, when you walk up to a tree- to climb it, to work in it, to fall it- you are betting your knowledge, experience, and common sense that you'll accomplish your goal without an accident.
This is the lore of treework that makes it exciting for some and fearful for others"

Guess I won't need to wait for Ed to identify that one:)
 
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